Why Hire a Transportation Engineer?

These images demonstrate why having a transportation engineer on your team can help on your project. Often traffic control and navigation (i.e. signing and pavement markings) are overlooked, as is the operation of access locations in the construction of parking areas and internal roadways for a development. Standard designs from municipal guidelines are often used by planners, architects and engineers without consideration for unique circumstances or constraints. A transportation engineer can provide input into the design of a site to make it function more efficiently and safely for vehicles and pedestrians; and this input does not always result in increased project costs, in many scenarios a more efficient design can reduce overall costs.

If you have unique challenges and constraints for your development, a transportation engineer may be able to help. For example, a constrained site may have a limited area available for on-site parking. Obtaining a variance from bylaw parking requirements, or the use of transportation and parking demand management strategies to more efficiently use the available parking can help to resolve the constraints on the available parking supply.

This is a video of the installation of a pedestrian bridge span over the CPR and C-Train lines at Heritage Station in southwest Calgary. The erection had to be done at night when the rail lines were not in use. I took this time lapse from a camera set up on my balcony.

I was working at Delcan Corporation during the design of this project, and because I lived next to the site I helped out with the public engagement, including two presentations to the owners of the condo building I live in. That engagement kept the owners (i.e. future users) of the bridge informed on its progress and resulted in minor changes to the design to improve its use when the bridge was completed.

I combined the comments from my neighbours with my knowledge of the traffic I observed every day on my commute to improve the connectivity of the bridge to both the existing pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure, and still be an efficient connection to the C-Train platform.